How AI can help improve your public relations

Artificial intelligence can be a great PR assistant, but it’s not the end-all for content creation.

Artificial intelligence has taken the tech community by storm in 2023. Originally treated as a novelty, it has quickly become an effective tool in multiple fields. Public relations can benefit from the AI revolution as well.

But before looking at how AI can improve your PR, it’s important to learn what AI is.

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What is artificial intelligence?

To put it simply, current artificial intelligence generates new content based on information it’s trained on. For example, an AI designed to create written content is fed a large pool of written content and is then able to create new content drawing from the information it was trained on.

Content from an AI is generated via prompts a human sends to the AI. For instance, if you wanted it to write a blog post about car oil, you’d use a prompt like, “Write a seven-paragraph essay about how to check if your car’s oil needs to be changed.”

Several AI generators you can use now include:

• ChatGPT (text)
• GPT-4 (in-depth text and logic)
• DALL-E 2 (images)
• Bard (text)
• Murf.ai (voices)

Why should your company consider AI for PR?

Artificial intelligence is a great tool for creating quality content that is important for modern public relations. Some ways it can be used include:

• Simplifying content-creation processes: With AI, your company can quickly create basic content for both written and visual content that can be improved by the rest of your team. This can help your company send out more content quickly.
• Research: Your company can use AI generators to do research on subjects you’d like to write about. If there’s something you need clarification about, asking an AI for help can be just what you need.
• Inspiration: AI can also be used to inspire human-driven content creation. For instance, a generated graphic might give your team a new idea for a graphic to be used on social media, or a quick essay made in ChatGPT can prevent writer’s block on your writing team when creating new blog posts.
• Prototyping: Related to inspiration, AI is a good tool if you want to quickly prototype some things, such as how a blog post on a certain subject or a possible layout for a social media graphic would look.
• Spoken content: With AI, your company can create spoken versions of text content that sound like a real person is reading it. This can be used for, among other things, narrating videos or making audio versions of a blog post.

AI isn’t perfect

AI seems like the ideal companion for public relations work, but there are some issues to be on the lookout for.

Using AI isn’t the “I win” button for PR it might appear to be. If your company is interested in using AI-generated content for live content, you’ll need to have humans check and correct mistakes made by the AI.

• For written content, humans who know about the subject the AI has created content for should fact-check the generated content, and copy editors are essential to ensure grammar and spelling are correct.
• Visual content generators have been improving, but it’s still important to have humans check over content created. This prevents issues like people having four instead of five fingers and ensures images don’t look like they were poorly photoshopped, like each human in an image having different lighting.

Experiment with AI in PR

AI is a rapidly growing field, but that doesn’t mean your company’s public relations team or external firm can’t start discussing using it and trying AI on a trial basis. Content-generation tools that use AI are already effective enough that they can help improve your company’s PR content creation processes, whether it’s by making content you want to use or simply inspiring your content development teams.

If your company would like to start using AI, contact us! We’d be happy to share pointers on how to use it.

Clients love Jacob’s speed. Jacob is an inbound marketing-certified webmaster. He earned an integrated communications degree from Florida State College at Jacksonville. Jacob joined Axia PR as an intern in August 2015 and earned his way into a critical role at our PR agency.